Photo: TikTok
The person who did it must have an understanding of agriculture. But who would do such an evil act?
By Ethan Cotler — Written on Apr 13, 2023
The cost of living has been rising worldwide, and people are feeling it. In the U.K., food prices have climbed 18% higher in February 2023 compared to a year prior, marking a 45-year high. So, some people have resorted to creative ways to feed themselves.
One woman not only fed herself but also her community before tragedy struck.
She was growing food to feed the community when a vandal threw salt on her land to destroy the crops.
Carly Burd, a mother of three in Harlow, England, has been growing food to help feed local impoverished people. According to ITV, she began growing her own food after she found her disability benefits for multiple sclerosis were not enough to feed her family.
She initially started growing in her own garden and donating some of the food she grew. Since then, she expanded to an unused piece of land nearby.
Donations started to pour in, along with the fresh produce she was giving back to the community. So, Burd was making roughly 20 deliveries per week to people in need.
She fed 1,600 mouths through her efforts. Local children planted 300 onions just before her hard work was quashed in a single night. She posted to the video-sharing app TikTok that a vandal had jumped into the land she was cultivating and poured salt on it.
Tears streamed from her face as she said she was “heartbroken.” Salt doesn’t just kill crops, it also wreaks havoc on the soil. It can take years for rainwater to flush out the salt and make the soil viable again.
“So, all the hours and hours and hours of work that we’ve put in is now dead. And they’ve done it everywhere,” Burd said. She showed the salt covering the land in vertical lines.
Despite the horrible deed done to her community farm, she is not giving up.
“You won’t stop me because I’ll just pick it all up, and I’ll carry on,” she said. “I can’t plant in this section, but I’ll carry on.”
People in the comments shared their dismay. “You are an angel. I cannot wrap my mind around why someone would do this,” one person wrote. “Only a truly hateful person could do this. I’m so sorry, but you will find another way to help others,” another added.
Others questioned who would’ve possibly carried out such a harmful act. Understanding that salt kills soil would take knowledge of agriculture that the average person does not possess. Burd insinuated that it was most likely someone who grows food themselves.
Other people questioned if it was the local government not wanting people to grow their own crops, but she quickly shut down this theory. “The council helped me get the land it’s not them,” she wrote in reply to a comment.
Luckily, many people donated to help undo the damage done.
Burd set up a GoFundMe to help her community project, “A Meal on me With Love,” before the vandal destroyed the land. But when word spread of what happened to her crops, donations quickly began to pour in.
Currently, she has over £185,000, or roughly $230,000, far exceeding her £4,000 goal. British celebrities like businessman Steven Bartlett and former soccer player Gary Lineker even chipped in.
Burd still has work to do to cultivate new land to continue her mission of feeding her community, but the donations will help. She and several volunteers dug up a significant amount of the salt, which she estimated to be over 11 pounds. She plans to put some topsoil over it to potentially allow crops to grow again on the land. If that doesn’t work, she wants to turn it into a seating area for people to congregate to eat and chat.
Ethan Cotler is a writer living in Boston. He writes on entertainment and news.